The Ethics of the Gaze: Levinas, Objectification, and the Reclamation of Subjectivity

Friday, March 21, 2025

Emmanuel Levinas, in Totality and Infinity, presents the idea that encountering another’s face places us in a position of ethical responsibility. This concept challenges traditional Western philosophies that emphasize knowledge and domination over the other. For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter disrupts totalization; it is an appeal that demands recognition of the other’s humanity. However, when we analyze this through the lens of gender dynamics, particularly in patriarchal societies, we see that this ethical responsibility is often corrupted—especially when it comes to the way men look at women.

The Male Gaze: A Denial of Subjectivity

The “male gaze”, a concept articulated by Laura Mulvey, describes the way women are visually positioned as objects to be consumed by a heterosexual male audience. This gaze is not a neutral act; it is an assertion of power. In contrast to Levinas’ ethical call to responsibility through the face-to-face encounter, the male gaze actively refuses this ethical demand. Instead of recognizing the woman as an autonomous subject, it reduces her to an object within a spectacle designed for male consumption.

When a man looks at a woman through this lens, he is not encountering her—he is encountering an image of his own desires projected onto her. This strips her of the ability to exist as an ethical subject in her own right. Levinas' ethics suggest that seeing another human should create an obligation towards them. But in a society structured around the commodification of women’s bodies, this responsibility is inverted; the gaze becomes a mechanism of control, where the one who looks asserts power over the one who is seen.

The Ethics of Resistance: Reclaiming the Subjective Gaze

For a woman navigating public spaces, this objectifying gaze is an act of epistemic violence. To be stripped of subjectivity, to be forced into an appearance that exists only in relation to another’s desires, is to be denied the very ethical encounter that Levinas describes. This is why many women experience physical discomfort, rage, or dissociation when subjected to this gaze. It is not simply a reaction to attention—it is the body rejecting an imposed status of objecthood.

The act of reclaiming subjectivity in this context is an ethical imperative. Women who refuse to perform availability, who reject conventional expectations of aesthetic presentation, or who deliberately cultivate an aura of opacity, are not merely making stylistic choices—they are resisting a system that denies them their full humanity. The refusal to be “read” in a way that aligns with patriarchal expectations is a form of radical ethical self-assertion.

Levinas describes the ethical encounter as a moment of infinite openness, where we see the other as beyond our grasp. This is the antithesis of objectification, which seeks to make the other fully graspable, consumable, and interchangeable. True ethical seeing, then, requires not just a rejection of the male gaze but a complete restructuring of how visibility functions in our society.

Beyond Visibility: The Power of the Invisible

For many women, particularly those who recognize the violent implications of being seen under patriarchal terms, there is power in being unreadable. If the male gaze functions as an apparatus of control, then opacity becomes a tool of liberation.

Rather than striving for a form of visibility that is still mediated through patriarchal approval, the radical move is to embrace a different mode of existence—one that is not dictated by external perception. This aligns with Levinas’ idea that true ethical relationships emerge not from possession but from recognizing the unknowability of the other.

This is why women who cultivate an aura of independence, intelligence, and self-possessed subjectivity unsettle the structures designed to consume them. They embody an alternative ontology—one that refuses commodification and insists on existing for oneself.

Reconstructing the Ethics of Seeing

Levinas’ ethical philosophy offers a powerful lens through which to critique patriarchal dynamics of vision and objectification. The ethical gaze is one that acknowledges and respects the infinite depth of the other. The male gaze, by contrast, flattens, consumes, and erases.

To reclaim agency in a world that weaponizes visibility against women, it is necessary to cultivate new ways of existing—ways that reject the demand to be seen on patriarchal terms and instead embrace an existence defined by self-possession and subjectivity. This is not merely an aesthetic or intellectual choice; it is an ethical imperative, a fundamental restructuring of what it means to see and be seen.